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Product Description

Despite hailing from a small village in Patna, Shyamlal (Barun Chanda) is entirely immersed in the comforts of his high paying corporate job. On her first visit to Calcutta, his young sister-in-law Tutul (Sharmila Tagore), who lives in Shyamlal's native place, is dismayed by his boastful displays of accumulated perks and privileges. However his façade cracks when a lucrative export order faces cancellation. Faced with the possibility of losing everything he has built, Shyamlal concocts a plot of feigned industrial sabotage to save face and protect company prestige.

Satyajit Ray's Company Limited is an epochal portrait of the rise of the educated urban middle-class. Shyamlal's ironic ascendancy up the corporate ladder, a rise in statute simultaneously accompanied by a fall in character, is the director's starkest reflection on modern India. The middle-part of the thematically related Calcutta trilogy (between The Adversary and The Middleman), Company Limited is a work of considerable psychological complexity and high technical accomplishment.

Review

Ray's humorous examination of those who lack the courage to pause and look at their place in the world is wonderfully observed and often surprisingly funny --Film4

Ray's rich and perceptive dissection of India's emerging middle class is as pointed now as it was upon first release --Edinburgh Filmhouse

A gentle, exquisitely realized comedy, beautifully observed, sweet and enriching! --The New York Times

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BE WARNED: This DVD will not play on my standard Sony DVD player even though Amazon describes it as "Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only.)" The reason is that it is in PAL format. So dig through the fine print in your DVD player manual to make sure that it will play PAL format before you buy this DVD. My Region 1 Sony will play NTSC only, so it will not play it.

Company Limited (Seemabaddha) is Satyajit Ray's 1971 drama about the rise of a man's career. The first couple of minutes of the film bring us up-to-speed with what happened up to this point in the life of Shyamalendu Chatterjee, the main character. It saves us from having to slowly figure this out over the course of the film and gives us a reference for taking in the rest of the story. Shyamalendu is likeable because he is successful and ambitious. We can't help but think that life is good, at least for some people.

After receiving a letter from Hindustan-Peters that he got the job as an executive, but before he actually started working, Shyamalendu marries a woman named Dolan. His personal life is going well and they have a child; at work he is successful, and his future looks very promising as he is on the verge of a promotion. The story continues in the present time with his wife informing him that her sister Tutul is going to be visiting them for a couple weeks.

Perhaps not entirely intentional, Tutul makes a bit of tension in the house. Shyamalendu is taken in by her looks and there is chemistry between them. He jokingly comments that he wonders if he picked the right sister, but on some level, I think he was at least partially serious about it. When he last saw her she was just a girl, now Tutul is a beautiful woman. Tutul is taken by the glamour of life at the top but also sees its emptiness and that it has an unpleasant side too.

Company Limited shows us a story about playing the game of getting ahead in life. Life as the sales manager of a fan and lamp company isn't without its troubles. There are some parallels between the successes and failures he experiences at work and home, giving a sense of balance to the story. Satyajit Ray makes the story interesting by having the main plot being easy to understand and straightforward while the more subtle parts keep us guessing and give us room to debate.